My eldest is nine years old, which means it’s only a matter of time before she tapes posters of teenage boys with swoopy hair on her walls and won’t leave the house if iCarly is on.  She’ll attempt to put on makeup and start wearing hoochy clothes.  She will teeter between listening to me and making her own decisions, her brain in turmoil over being torn between obedience and rebellion.  Her body will do the same thing during this transition to teenager, and the ever-so-attractive Tween years will have officially arrived.

But here’s the thing.  I also have a three year old, who despite her bouncy sugar coated curly hair and uber soft skin, is going through a transition of her own.  She’s starting to turn into a kid, and I can tell you that there has been an age bracket that has been sorely overlooked for years: The Twid.

The Twid is the young version of the Tween, a child around three or four years old who is no longer toddling and not quite riding a bike.  They exhibit all of the same characteristics of a Tween, however scaled back to a size 3T.  Let me elaborate.

Twids are not not hard to spot.  While the Tween’s choice of clothing is not to parent’s standards, neither are the Twid’s.  Twids have minimal fashion sense, feeling that anything with polka dots surely matches anything else with polka dots.  Color and shade do not matter.  Neither do seasons, and a Twid can usually be found wearing snow boots in July and four pairs of shorts and a tutu in the dead of Winter.

Twids also begin to form their own thoughts, just as Tweens do.  The difference is that Twids have not learned the intricate art of tact and will point things out at times and in places where it is completely inappropriate.  For example, while everyone in the checkout lane at the grocery store may smell something less than pleasant coming from the man with the giant eyebrows, the Twid has no problem saying out loud that the guy with the fuzzy face made a tooter.

The Twid’s opinions also carry over into their home life as they begin to make decisions about the things they’d like to eat and what time they’d like to go to sleep.  Neither one is to the parent’s liking, and both of them are a true test to the patience of even the weariest mom.  In fact, she is likely to give in to the Twid, as I myself have done with my own, dress her up in a Halloween costume in early March and drag her to the store for yet more PBJ supplies.

Just don’t pick the checkout lane with the hairy guy.